techfeathers

I’m actually sort of interested in the contrast. I think you’re right, that it is sort of obvious that doomscrolling news is bad for mental health, and it’s a sad change.

Fox is proudly larger than all the other cable news outlets combined. Sinclaire pens most local media, Wall Street journal is conservative, Joe Rogan is the largest of all podcasts. What does that leave, the New York Times? How is it we still view the conservative media as not part of the MSM when conservative media dominates the eyeballs and cultural zeitgeist combined? It’s like calling Apple a startup.

Congratulations, conservatives won, we can stop pretending they’re niche now.

I mean most research is trying to figure out things we think are intuitive, but I actually find it somewhat interestingly. It says negative content, not news, so I wonder how this compares to say heavy metal or horror movies where people may use negative offline content in a way that may help process negative emotions.

Something always seemed incomplete about testing models against standardized tests; I would expect AI models to first do well on standardized tests, much better than humans, but it makes me wonder if there’s something else that humans possess that isn’t tested by these tests. We test humans in these tests to, and I would guess that loosely speaking there’s a correlation between a persons success on an advanced math test or the bar and success in their career, but we also sort of know examples where there’s an appearance of an inverse correlation, people who do great as a phd student or mathlete who can’t operate in a day to day job.

So when AI companies start saying these AI are as intelligent as a PHD student, it makes me wonder, most people aren’t as smart as a phd student and yet AI still seems to choke on some basic tasks.

On the left? This issue has been uniquely bi-partisan. From the article:

“ So when UHC’s CEO was assassinated yesterday morning, on his way to brag to his shareholders about record profits, not many people were confused about the motive. What was surprising was the gleeful re-unification of a divided internet - from MAGA twitter threads to progressive BlueSky conversations to the entire nursing subreddit - over a man’s brutal death on a midtown sidewalk. Vaccine skeptics and physicians who have been at each other’s throats since 2020 found the one medical issue on which they are passionately on the same side.”

Thirty percent is a big number when you’re thinking of consequences like bankruptcy and death.

This seems to be part of the civilization / institution — chaos / individual retribution axis.

I.e. yes, we absolutely should prosecute more white collar crime.

So, not the USA then?

https://www.democracymatrix.com/ranking

The liquid democracy thing I find interesting. I guess I don’t trust that anyone with any semblance of power actually wants something that looks like direct democracy, so I’m suss that it would ever be implemented in a fair way, and I’m curious how something would be implemented by a group of people who are probably biased to believe the historical warnings against direct democracy.

Something I’ve really become aware of recently is that rationality is sort of a bell curve. I think really successful people tend to be more biased than people in the middle of the curve.

I think this is because of optimization. Some people try to optimize for true beliefs, because it’s a defense mechanism, because of values, etc. whereas others try to optimize for useful beliefs, and contrarian beliefs can be more useful than perfectly accurate beliefs.

I've had this observation recently I think of as like "trickle-down everything". It came up after a recent conversation I had with someone asking when Kevin Spacey's career was coming back, and it's sort of this idea presented in the article, which is if we have this Jesus-like compassion for our celebrities, it is somehow representative that humanity is compassionate. That a person doesn't have to do the hard work of figuring out how to interact with difficult every-day people or actually confront difficult emotions; but that the real work is just to say something like "everyone deserves due process" but only when talking about some wealthy popular figure in the news.

sort of amusing they have this example:

> imagine if getting a credit card required an annual trip to the local state Department of Credit Cards where you had to wait in line for the whole day for the right to transact!

Which may ironically be a good idea?

But I think the person who wrote this article believes it. And I think it’s amazing to have seen the past year or so of massive rebranding of the second Trump administration as the savior of America. I feel naively open minded to the possibility, and yet of course are all the unspoken impacts of everything that the author promotes. The massive disruption to everything. And then the “all you have to do is” ness of it all.

It doesn’t say that prices have to higher, food suppliers could meet the requirements by providing the same low prices they provide to big businesses to small retailers.

I’ve been trying to think a lot more about “building community” lately, and I think this person hits on something which is just that the current American system sort of since the eighties has been so focused on career progression and self-enrichment, not that it’s bad, but it’s interesting that the there are such dualities in our values.

But also, every year or two I try going to a church, but I wonder if the beliefs or practices largely don’t make sense.

On the one hand, I fantasize about going to some super conservative thousand year old European cathedral, and I do feel like there would be a sense of wonder in that.

But going to a suburban mega church and listening to Christian Rock doesn’t cut it.

I’ve been looking for some kind of thing to study. I picked up the Harvard classics series, maybe something like that would be interesting to build a faith group around? But yeah…

I feel like there’s a really interesting discussion to be had hear about crypto and debanking obfuscated by Marc’s clearly bad faith / biased / hiply cynical dialogue with Joe Rogan.

I’m not sure how the marketplace of ideas is really supposed to transact, but it seems like the conversations are too isolated. I’m not pro crypto, and maybe I should be! But I am zero surprised that parts of the government are against it, and the discourse around it is so detached. Maybe we should have public hearings?

But you sort of have one side obfuscating their arguably nefarious actions, and then another side largely going “trust me, bro”.

FTX showed on a smaller scale the crypto could get itself interwoven with the traditional economy in ways that could lead to a 2008 style crash, and nothing crypto does has led me to believe they really care.

Maybe we should have more Crypto, but we should go into it with eyes open to the fact that the creators envision a much more libertarian culture than most people are comfortable with.

Probably not as surprising given the recent reports that Twitter downranks tweets with hyperlinks.

One thing that I don’t get about this is the suggestion that degree attainment is about skill building. I have a masters degree, and my degree was almost entirely knowledge attainment, not skill building. Nothing about that degree was designed to raise my reading skill, it was designed to provide a base level of knowledge that could be built upon in practice.

I dunno, I do occasionally have this fantasy that I’d gone to some advanced prep school where they really did some education to me. But I’m sort of fundamentally anti-authoritarian, so I can’t imagine I would have gotten anything out of it. Can we really teach reading skills above and beyond what someone is inclined to teach themselves? Are there proven methods?

For Marc Andreessen trying to support the creation of new banks and financial institution, there’s no pros and cons to the CFPB, it’s all cons.

I remember listening to the podcast of this debate and found this read interesting. I’m sort of inherently inclined to take Klein’s side here, but one thing that Harris said in the debate I thought was really important was that we need to be able to talk about controversial things. Like what if some inconvenient science came out showed minority group a way in some way that could be interpreted inferior to majority group b (this was in response to a study that I think showed that white people had more Neanderthal dna than black people - what if the results had been the reverse)

But then, Harris’ response to regrettable conclusions doesn’t seem grounded. If you’re going to say it’s ok to rationally decide that 6 extends from 1-5. What’s to stop you from saying that policy should extend from rationality. That with limited funds, educational opportunities should preference populations with high IQs.

He sort of has this well obviously we shouldn’t implement policy that preferences groups over individuals. He rejects talking about the moral/political implications of his discussion of intelligence, and then somehow makes the assertion that his moral framework is indisputably correct.

I wonder how much of this is “lazy developers” and “quiet quitting” vs the beurocracies , processes and tangled code of big tech companies. I’m not saying they’re aren’t lazy employees, but I intentionally work at a small company because of the lower barrier to get shit done. My short experiences at big tech companies make me wonder if I would get much more then 1-2 small code changes out per month if I worked there.

I wonder how efficient the developers at Twitter really are. I remember when George Hotz interned at Twitter to fix search, and he like downloaded the source code, diddled around with it and quit after a few months. Making changes at big tech companies is hard, and it’s a management issue as much if not more than an engineering issue.

I’m not the guy who says all employees are equally valuable, that’s a worthless platitude and I’ve seen countless examples to the contrary, but I’m equally skeptical of claims by upper management that it would all be peaches if it wasn’t for those pesky lazy developers.

Bari Weiss’ article seems to say that the concerns are bipartisan. Marc Andreesen outright said it was only folks on the right getting debanked and implied it was Elizabeth Warren doing the debanking.

I'm watching the youtube video now, and I'm trying to find evidence that David Horowitz was debanked for having the wrong political views.

Marc seems to be making 2 claims. One, The US Government debanks marijuana dealers, sex workers and crypto companies that break federal law.

Two, that the US Government de-banks people for having the wrong right-wing (never left-wing) politics.

The first I buy and I think is worth debating, the second I can't find any evidence for.

I'm about an hour in, and so far, really disappointed. So far it's Democrats all bad, Republicans all good, almost to the point it feels like propaganda for Trump's second term. For example - Tim Walz is a pathological liar, but Trump's great, even though everyone knows that JD Vance is VP because no one in Silicon Valley really trusts Trump. Why can't we just acknowledge this?

I wasn't a huge fan of Joe Rogan, but I was really disappointed by his endorsement of Trump, because it felt like this acknowledgement that the age of analyzing ideas on their merits was over, and that hyper-partisanship won.

There is a meta-idea here in this presentation, and that is that it feels very manipulative. I'm thinking sort of about the section on Roman virtues, and I do agree with the general idea that more people should strive to live up to a set of virtues, whatever they are. But there's no real deep engagement with it, it seems like it's expected to have this halo effect where, we talked about Roman virtues so you can see that we're the good guys so we're right about everything else we talk about.

I'm sort of reflexively responding to this idea that we should focus on good ideas wherever they come from. And there are good ideas here, but it feels like the good ideas are trying to serve an end and not honestly considered.

I think the three hour format is probably good if you're an independent actor or intellection, but Marc is clearly acting as a partisan, biased political actor here, and it's especially frustrating the way he pays lip service to humility and virtue.

Not that it's not good to know the opinions of biased political actors in our society. But I want intellectual curiosity, not cynical quips.

Do you have a link or something? I can’t tell from the way you worded this if those states aren’t getting enough federal funding or too much?

This is a good idea, if it doesn’t get whacked by the end of Chevron deference, and if anyone has government healthcare left after the chainsaw comes through. But credit where credit is due.

I have a feeling you're going to see a lot of this in the next ten years with fintech cozying up to big Gov. And it's a weird dynamic to me. Stuff like this is why you have tight regulations.

Do I feel bad for the Fedex driver who lost her life savings? Yes, but like I keep most of my money in a relatively low risk low interest rate credit union. This exact decision making of "I'm going to go with this new-fangled tech startup with high interest rates" is exactly the kind of approach that gets you to risk your life savings. But it def. sucks that their approach seems to be praying on the vulnerable. It's one thing when someone on wallstreetbets loses their life savings. It's another thing when someone thinks their money is in a savings account.

But like, I'm at Yotta's website and the hero text is "Play games, win big". Not exactly a safe money vibe.

I'm having trouble losing sleep over the "underpopulation crisis". This seems like an organic reaction to the plant growing in too small a pot. Grow the pot and the plant will grow, or the plant will shrink until it's ready to start growing again.

Maybe we're just at the natural equilibrium of the capacity of the planet given all extenuating factors, and with enhanced technology or interplanetary travel, we'll exceed those.

I remember reading a thing that the reason why like day care late pickup fees are borderline extortionary, is that if they make the late pickup fees reasonable, then the average person will consider it a fee for service and not a punishment and use it more. Likewise, 5 cents for a plastic bag is like now you’re providing a service with expectations.

I think part of this is you have to know yourself. I imagine there are some people out there who can really sort of discipline themselves into doing a good job - through checklists or really good review processes.

Personally I do everything in my power not to be disciplined. I intentionally make my first draft terrible. I almost make it my goal to write bad code instead of good code(. I’m an SRE not a full time developer for what it’s worth)

And then I sort of find adversarial ways to circle around the solution. Write tests etc. I don’t know how to describe it but I never want a close eye or “discipline” to be the solution to the problem. Use tools for linting/schema validation/testing and trust them and when they don’t catch something evolve them.

It’s funny you say “rarely, but sometimes I have bad weeks”. Whereas I approach it the opposite. Sure every once in a while I have a good week where I don’t make many mistakes. But I approach my work like making mistakes is the rule, not the exception. And lean into it.

And I will say it would be crazy of me to say that in all this time I haven’t developed a pretty good eye. I certainly catch a lot of things people with less experience don’t, and my first drafts are much better now then they were earlier in my career. But I don’t rely on that experience, because I’m fallible.